ReFrame
A creative prompt tool that generates ideation prompts uniquely customized to data related to your project
How can we see a concept from a different perspective to inspire new ideas?
Ideas often come from crossing over boundaries to discover new territory. By simply juxtaposing unexpected concepts together, existing perceptions can be turned on their heads and new interpretations and ideas discovered. ReFrame is a creative prompt tool that leverages this creative power of reinterpretation by juxtaposing language from a designer’s notes in surprising ways to provoke new associations between concepts.
Mixing up a designer’s ‘moves’
Inspired by field research at IDEO, ReFrame was originally developed as a card deck to help designers integrate some ‘structured serendipity’ into their design process during early concept brainstorming sessions, similar to Eno & Schmidt’s (1975) Oblique Strategies. ReFrame specifically tries to help introduce new variables into a designer’s habits to help get out of a creative rut; as one interviewee said, “every designer has their ‘moves’ that they work through to test out ideas” and it can be inspiring to try something different occasionally.
When using the tool, users can generate a prompt by randomly selecting cards for several variables or ‘moves’ that are core to the creative process: the artefact to be designed, e.g. an object, image, service etc; an inspiration source, e.g. senior citizens, nature, cities etc; the experience evoked e.g. responsive, discrete, approachable; and the medium used e.g. paint, CAD, code, card and tape.
An early prototype of the ReFrame card deck
An idea inspired by designer’s using ReFrame
Digitizing juxtapositions
Extending this concept into a digital tool afforded many benefits: many more designers could access the tool and the words included in the prompts could be more easily customized to specific projects. Instead of shuffling cards, users can now quickly generate a whole new randomized prompt or change individual words within the prompt until they find one they prefer. The interaction design of the Reframe tool—a slowly animated swelling and overlapping of the prompt words—helps users patiently reflect on the possibilities from juxtaposing the different words and encouraged new interpretations of seemingly conflicting concepts.
The digital ReFrame tool also includes a ‘save’ button for users to capture an image of any prompts they find inspiring, ‘screensaver mode’ that automatically generates new prompts every 8 seconds, and an ‘upload’ feature that enables designers to customize the words included in the prompts.
The words that Reframe includes in the prompts are stored in a Google spreadsheet. By appending the unique spreadsheet ID to the Reframe website address, users can create prompts that include their own words. These words can be entered manually into the Google spreadsheet or automated through the ‘upload’ feature. Users can copy and paste text, upload pdf documents and add website links to customize the database of words stored in the spreadsheet. The system uses Python Natural Language Toolkit (Loper & Bird, 2002) to parse the text in this uploaded content, sort the words into nouns and adjectives and add parts of speech e.g. indefinite articles and plural endings. WordNet, a lexical database (Miller, 1995), is also used to find synonyms and antonyms of the uploaded words to add unexpected content to the database. Once the uploaded content has been parsed, the words are sorted by frequency and a randomly distributed sample of up to 50 selected to be transferred to the Google spreadsheet. I made the design decision to only transfer this subset of uploaded content after feedback on early prototypes suggested that including all of the parsed words led to an overwhelming variety of concepts in the prompts generated by the tool.
ReFrame in the real world
“ReFrame makes me understand a new word that I wouldn’t have related to my project”.
In the latter phases of the design process, designers can often become bound to using one tool due to a lack of interoperability (Bernal et al. 2015). Conversely, in the earlier, more bricolage explorations designers visit many ‘creative watering holes’ and flit between many different tools and methods to discover new ideas. As with all of the tools I create, the ReFrame tool was not designed to act alone, but be one element in a bulging toolbox that designers can use to find inspiration. In order to discover how ReFrame could be effective as part of this toolbox, I conducted several user studies in lab and ‘in the wild’.
A user testing ReFrame in a lab study
One of the main tools that I compared ReFrame to was Google’s search engine, one of many users primary inspiration sources. Despite participants’ familiarity with using Google to gather a large quantity of information on a theme, its statistically-derived curation meant this knowledge was situated in terms of what other people have done and thought before; the “generally accepted ‘norm’ answers”. While this helped some participants identify common features or trends, it led others to feel there was “too much priming in the wrong direction.” This aggregate quality of Google was considered beneficial when the participant has already “honed in on something narrow” and is “thinking about framing their enquiry”, but was “not useful for deeply assessing where [their] ideas were situated” and therefore not the right tool for coming up with new ideas. In order to do that, users had to come up with interesting search terms in order to get inspiring results, hence the responses could only be “as creative as your own mind essentially allows you to be.”
Designers testing ReFrame in an IDEO workshop
Comparison of designs created from inspirations found on Google and ReFrame for a project exploring “automated systems that we trust”
Many users were pleasantly surprised at the power of the ReFrame creative prompts to provoke new perspectives and “bring new ideas into old concepts”. With ReFrame, the ability to quickly click through many randomly juxtaposed prompts challenged users to consider unexpected, divergent concepts that prompted “new and very different points of views on my ideas”; a feeling that several users described as being rare in comparison to other computational design tools today. that The customization of the prompts with data from their notes also meant that they could converge on a few ideas that were still relevant to their project: “it makes me understand a new word that I wouldn’t have related to the project”.
Overall, users found that the juxtapositions in the responses provided by the tools—something I could also describe as a higher level of creative agency on the machine’s part—allowed for more variety of interpretations of concepts within their projects and a greater possibility for new connections and ideas to be made.
Paper citations